In this discussion offer your in-depth  thoughts on the readings from each of the following secti

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2007 28: 452Journal of Family Issues
April L. Few

Family Studies Research
Integrating Black Consciousness and Critical Race Feminism Into

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452

Integrating Black
Consciousness and Critical
Race Feminism Into Family
Studies Research
April L. Few
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg

The author examines the advantages and challenges of using Black feminist
theory and critical race feminist theory to study the lives of Black women and
families in family studies. The author addresses the ways in which these per-
spectives, both of which are intentional in their analyses of intersectionality and
the politics of location, are also distinct. She provides empirical examples from
how family researchers have used Black feminist theory or a critical race fem-
inist lens to examine the lives of Black women and families, and suggests ways
for colleagues to embrace an explicit integration of Black consciousness and
critical race feminist perspectives in family studies.

Keywords: Black feminism; Black women; critical race feminism; intersec-
tionality; theory

Understanding race, ethnicity, and culture in family processes remains adifficult and precarious undertaking for family scholars. The infamous
Moynihan Report of 1965, The Negro Family: The Case for National
Action, cast a long shadow on the viability of Black family studies and the
credibility of Black family scholars. Against the backdrop of the Black
Power Movement, blaxploitation films, the resurgence of political conser-
vatism, and the dismantling of domestic social programs, Black family
scholars in the 1970s and 1980s offered poignant critiques of the prevailing
pathological cultural deviant models predominately being published in
mainstream family studies and sociological journals (W. Allen, 1978;

Journal of Family Issues
Volume 28 Number 4
April 2007 452-473

© 2007 Sage Publications
10.1177/0192513X06297330

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Author’s Note: I gratefully acknowledge Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Harriette McAdoo, Katherine
Allen, Fred Piercy, Sally Lloyd, Stephanie Mitchem, Norma Burgess, Edith Lewis, and Libby
Balter Blume for their thoughtful reviews of this article through its various stages of development.

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McAdoo, 1988; McAdoo & McAdoo, 1985; Peters, 1988; Stack, 1974;
Staples, 1971). They also provided cultural relevance models to explore
hidden resiliencies and strengths of Black communities. In the process,
Black family scholars laid down a foundation for Afrocentric revisionist
history in family studies while discrediting the normative standard posed by
the Moynihan Report and carving out a political space in the National
Council on Family Relations.

In this struggle to redefine the realities of Black women and families,
Black family scholars found kindred allies in feminist family scholars who
also were blazing a path to revolutionize how we think about family and the
experiences of women. Through active collaboration, these groups strate-
gized to establish sections, and thus political voice, in the National Council
on Family Relations. In doing so, the beginning of an invigorating dis-
course that was cognizant of the interacting, sometimes-indivisible influ-
ences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation on family
dynamics occurred. Ethnic studies and women’s studies were intersecting
in family studies. Nearly 15 years later, in 2001, the Journal of Marriage
and Family published a special section edition, “Race, Ethnicity, Culture,
and Family Processes,” that demonstrated how far family scholars have
come in addressing race, ethnicity, and culture in our research. In 2005,
DeReus, Few, and Blume provided an overview of the utility of multicul-
tural and critical race feminist theoretical frameworks in family studies
research methods and praxis.

This article serves as a tangible articulation of DeReus et al.’s (2005) argu-
ment for greater use of multiethnic and critical race theories in family stud-
ies. Black feminism and critical race feminism provide sociohistorical lenses
to the experiences of Black women and their families in the United States. In
applying these frameworks to family studies research, I enrich our analyses
of intersectionality—the politics of location—that is negotiated from the
standpoint of Black women. By lending this critical lens to my analyses, I
give to Black women an authoritative voice about their experiences rather
than impose a normative gaze (e.g., Western, White, male, middle-class lens
is defined as normal and the standard to compare others; West, 1982) or pos-
itivist presumption (e.g., essentialized, uninterrogated notions of identity or
difference). Critical race feminist theory is particularly useful in focusing the
researcher on the examination of how various institutions with which Black
women must interact daily reinforce social inequalities.

In this article, I examine how family scholars (including myself) have
applied and incorporated Black feminism and critical race feminism into
family studies research. I postulate that to conduct research that adequately

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addresses how Black women negotiate interlocking social locations in their
lives and in their relational and familial processes, there are two major fac-
tors to consider. First, as social scientists, we must examine how Black
women come to understand themselves through the development of Black
female subjectivities, as can be articulated through Black feminism and
critical race feminism. Subjectivities are those identities that become most
salient to an individual in different social contexts (hooks, 1984). Second,
we must examine the tools—methods, methodologies, data interpretation
styles—that we use to produce, reproduce, and disseminate knowledge in
family studies research. In doing so, one is able to identify the compatibil-
ity of these theories with family theories and, thus, integrate a Black con-
sciousness into family studies. Family scholars need to be more explicit
about how they use and develop race-consciousness theory in their research
processes.

As a Black woman scholar, I contemplate how family scholars represent
the lives of Black women in family studies and how family scholars can
manifest “conscious and inclusive family studies” (K. R. Allen, 2000).
First, I describe the tenets of Black feminism and critical race feminism as
frameworks falling within Black feminism. Second, I discuss the strengths
and challenges of using Black feminism and critical race feminism as guid-
ing frameworks in family studies. Finally, I provide examples from my own
research using Black feminist theory to advance my understanding of the
lives of Black women.

Black Feminism: A Standpoint of Black Consciousness

Black feminism is a standpoint theory. It is, however, a standpoint theory
that transcends the arguments of mere identity politics and actively exam-
ines the politics of location in the lives of Black women and the groups of
which they are a part. In other words, Black feminism allows a creative
space where according to one’s own social location or station in life, Black
women can “legitimately” place a foot in two or more realities—what one
individually and/or collectively may perceive of what it is to be “Black” and
what it is to be a “woman” simultaneously (Martin, 1993). Black women
exist within an intersectionality matrix. An intersectionality matrix is a spe-
cific location where multiple systems of oppressions simultaneously cor-
roborate and subjugate to conceal deliberate, marginalizing ideological
maneuvers that define “Otherness.” In this unique location within the
matrix, specific “historical, geographical, cultural, psychic, and imaginative

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boundaries” (Mohanty, 1992, p. 75) influence how Black women have
come to define their shared and diverse experiences. The strategies that
Black women use to politicize their specific situatedness in respect to
unjust hierarchal social relationality are the politics of location. Black
women “do” identity politics out of necessity for survival. In Yearning,
hooks (1990) argued that marginality is not necessarily an imposed exis-
tence but rather a dynamic, multivocal, and transformative space that is
self-determined and self-defined in the language and memories of diverse
groups. Such a multifaceted analysis of identity and the politics of location
within the framework of Black feminism enables family scholars to move
away from narrow or essentialized definitions of Black subjectivity (i.e.,
generalization of Black experience).

Black feminist theory resulted from Black feminist activists and schol-
ars feeling far removed from White, middle-class, liberal feminist dis-
courses. As articulated by the Combahee River Collective (1977) and
Patricia Hill Collins (1991), Black feminists (a) acknowledge Black
women’s historical struggle against multiple oppressions; (b) examine how
Black women and their families negotiate the intersections of race, ethnic-
ity, gender, sexual orientation, and class; (c) eradicate malignant images of
Black womanhood; and (d) incorporate an activist perspective into their
research through the cocreation of knowledge with informants, conscious-
ness raising, and empowerment within the context of Black women’s lives.
Black feminism is also about acknowledging the common struggles that
Black women have with Black men—institutional racism and classism—
and that Black men and women can work together in liberating ways to
meet the criteria of Black feminism’s tenets. Doing Black feminism is to
balance a gender consciousness with race consciousness (e.g., race identi-
fication, power politics, system blame, and collective action orientation; see
Gurin, 1985). Methodologically, Black feminists and womanists use a vari-
ety of traditional (e.g., interviews, surveys, ethnographies) and nontradi-
tional (e.g., poetry, diaries, creative art, photography) data to examine the
lives of Black women and their families (Bell-Scott, 1995).

Black feminism is also the birthmother of womanism, coined by Alice
Walker. Walker (1983) defined a womanist as a “Black feminist or feminist
of color” (p. xi) and as a Black woman “committed to the survival and
wholeness of an entire people, both male and female” (p. i). Walker also
coined the phrase: “Womanist is to [Black] feminist as purple to lavender”
(p. xii). Some womanists, like Hudson-Weems (1993), would prefer to
sever the feminist–womanist tie by locating womanism in the words of
Sojourner Truth (i.e., Ain’t I A Woman) and Afrocentric cultural values. In

Few / Integrating Black Consciousness 455

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her book, Fighting Words, Collins (1998) discussed the multiple meanings
and uses of the terms Black feminism and womanism. Significantly, Collins
argued that the politics of labeling draw critical attention away from the
very circumstances that undermine Black women’s struggle to overcome
multiple oppressions.

How Critical Race Feminist Theory
Intersects Black Feminism

Before examining how family scholars can incorporate critical race fem-
inist theoretical perspectives in their research, I must first discuss critical
race theory, an influence on the development of critical race feminism.
According to legal scholar Adrien Wing (1997), critical race theory, as a
theoretical genre, officially emerged as a self-conscious entity in 1989. The
basic tenets of critical race theory that are pertinent to understanding the
genesis of critical race feminism are: (a) (racial and/or ethnic) identity is a
product of social thought and is not objective, inherent, fixed, or necessar-
ily biological; (b) individuals have potentially conflicting overlapping iden-
tities, loyalties, and allegiances; (c) racial and/or ethnic individuals and
groups negotiate intersectionality simultaneously in their lives in relation to
other groups and within the groups with which individuals are affiliated;
and (d) minority status presumes a competence for minority writers and
theorists to speak about race and the experiences of multiple oppressions
without essentializing those experiences (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001).

Critical race feminist theory emerged from critical race theory as a result of
racial and/or ethnic legal women scholars feeling excluded by their male peers
and White feminist legal scholars. It should be noted that critical race feminists
depart from some critical race theorists by rejecting blanket essentialization
of all minorities (Wing, 2000). As Wing stated, “our anti-essentialist premise
is that identity is not additive. In other words, Black women are not white
women plus color, or Black men, plus gender” (p. 7). They are antiessential-
ists in that they recognize the multiple locations and identities that women
inhabit (DeReus et al., 2005; Wing, 2000). Renowned critical race feminists
include Adrien K. Wing, Kimberle Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, Angela Harris,
Lani Guinier, and Berta Esperanza Hernández Truyol.

Critical race feminists are also multidisciplinary scholars, pulling from
a variety of feminist theoretical scholarship. For example, critical race fem-
inist theory has been informed by the writings of Black feminists and
multicultural feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Chandra

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Few / Integrating Black Consciousness 457

Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, Angela Davis, Cherri Moraga, Gloria
Anzuldúa, and Audre Lorde. Most critical race feminists, however, will not
readily identify themselves in the mainstream feminist movement. Their rea-
sons resonate with some womanists and third-wave Black feminists, who
believe that second-wave Black feminism is compromised by its association
with White, middle-class mainstream feminists. Critical race feminists are
interested in how domestic and international legal and social policies (e.g.,
welfare, education, health, child care and custodial rights, domestic violence,
immigration, and other aspects of family policy) assist or oppress racial
and/or ethnic women and their families (Crenshaw, 1993; DeReus et al.,
2005). Indeed, these topics are researched within family studies and can be
expounded on using a critical, revisionist lens.

Critical race feminists are also interested in conducting activist research
that has a social justice agenda. Thus, they choose methods that foster some
kind of political, social, or economic transformation that benefits the people
they study. Methodologically, they use nontraditional data such as life nar-
ratives, poetry, fiction, and revisionist histories in their research (Wing,
2000). Although critical race feminism is a distinct theoretical perspective,
in its evolving form, it can be considered a theoretical extension of Black
feminism when examining Black experiences.

Making Distinctions in the Two Critical Approaches

There are similarities and differences in how scholars use Black feminism
and critical race feminism to interpret informant experience. The similarities
between Black feminism and critical race feminism outnumber the differences.
For instance, both theories emphasize that identity politics and the politics of
location are contingent on difference and that differences can have strategic
value to empower or marginalize individuals and groups. Identity needs differ-
ence to be “identity.” Both theories emphasize the intrinsic and authentic value
of racial and/or ethnic scholarship in representing the lives of groups of which
researchers are a part. Black feminists and critical race feminists contribute to
the ongoing process of revisionist histories or herstories. They do not merely
offer a “story” that depathologizes the experiences and choices of their infor-
mants, for in doing so, they would misrepresent experience by hiding “dirty
laundry” or validating unhealthy behaviors. Instead, Black feminists and criti-
cal race feminists offer multiple “partial truths” from within-group experience
with the intent of accurately contextualizing choices and outcomes while bal-
ancing the ability of informants to tell their experiences.

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458 Journal of Family Issues

There are dissimilarities between the theories. One difference between
critical race feminism and Black feminism is one of disciplinary “birth-
place.” Critical race feminism emerged specifically out of legal studies and
critical race theory, whereas Black feminism emerged as a product of grass-
roots activism and social science and humanities scholarship. Black femi-
nism represents an enmeshment of efforts by community activists and an
articulation of those efforts by scholars for a diverse audience. Critical race
feminists may not identify themselves as being Black feminists (or any
multicultural feminists). Black feminists specifically speak to the experi-
ences of African American women and women of the African diaspora.
Critical race feminists contextualize the sociohistorical experiences of any
racial and/or ethnic group and tackle global legal and economic problems
for those racial and/or ethnic groups. Another noted difference as evidenced
by the scholarship of critical race feminists is the extensive examination of
legislation and case law while interweaving personal stories of their infor-
mants or documented testimonials (Wing, 2000).

In summary, both theoretical trajectories constitute a particular orienta-
tion and belief system to approaching family studies research. To claim the
identity of a Black feminist or a critical race feminist is to commit to a spe-
cific worldview and social justice agenda when designing a study, inter-
preting results, and developing implications that make sense to members of
a community who are studied. Both theories offer critical lenses that place
not only behavior under scrutiny but also the sociohistorical context of a
specified group or community.

Doing Critical Theory

In the Sourcebook of Family Theory and Research, edited by Bengtson,
Acock, Allen, Dilworth-Anderson, and Klein (2005), the editors postulated
that family scholars must recognize the contextual limits of traditional
family theory and research knowledge. The editors validated contextual
approaches, including multicultural and critical theories in family studies
research. A question that surfaces for family scholars is: If we should con-
sider these theories, what are the advantages and challenges of using criti-
cal race feminism and Black feminism in family research?

Advantages of Using Critical Theories

Eliminating marginalization while centering experience. One advantage
that critical race feminism and Black feminism bring to family research

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Few / Integrating Black Consciousness 459

is a context to center authentic voices or standpoint through the process of
contextual critical thinking. Both theories demand that the research cocreated
by informants be centered, critical, and empowering for the informants. Both
standpoint theories focus on how individuals and groups negotiate the politics
of location and the complexity of interlocking institutional oppressions.
Politics of location enable us to examine “the specificities of the ‘partial story’
without losing sight of the macro structures which locate and illuminate those
details” (Sudbury, 1998, p. 32). When we focus on location (i.e., those histor-
ical, geographical, cultural, psychic, and imaginative boundaries and axes of
self-definition), we emphasize the standpoint of our informants without essen-
tializing experience or privileging one voice above others within and outside
of the margins (Sudbury, 1998). Critical race feminism and Black feminism
inform us that “truth” of experience is multiple, contingent, partial, and situ-
ated. By using critical race feminism and Black feminism, we examine the
politics of decision-making processes to reveal hidden agendas and power
centers (Thomas, 1993) as well as hidden and emergent mediating and mod-
erating variables not captured fully by surveys.

Compatibility with family theories. Another advantage is that Black fem-
inism and critical race feminism fit well with several family theories. For
the purposes of this discussion, I discuss fitness with symbolic interaction-
ism and ecological theory. For symbolic interactionists, individuals are
pragmatic actors and creative informants who construct their social worlds
(see LaRossa & Reitzes, 1993, for extensive discussion). Society is a lin-
guistic or symbolic construct arising out of meaningful social processes.
These processes include the continuous negotiation of identities, roles, and
privileges at the intra- and interpersonal levels in contexts. As people inter-
pret events and contexts, they confer meaning to their situations and then
react according to that interpretation. Examining these interactions requires
getting at language and cocreated meanings concerning the social loca-
tions of individuals (Herman & Reynolds, 1994). It is within these premises
of symbolic interaction that Black feminist and critical race feminist theo-
ries are compatible. Black feminism and critical race feminism presume a
standpoint that is informed by a group’s shared history; these theories expli-
cate the parameters that influence the ontologies, epistemologies, and
worldview of individuals. Using a critical lens, researchers are able to
scrutinize the subjective world of informants and the normative gaze, the
symbolic context for reproduction of heteronormativity (Ingraham, 1996)
and Eurocentrism. Heteronormativity is a dualistic ideological framework
that privileges patriarchal systems of social organization over egalitarian
gender relations, heterosexuality over other forms of nonreproductive sexual

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460 Journal of Family Issues

expression, and family relationships formed through biological ties over
those resulting from fictive kinship (Oswald, Blume, & Marks, 2005). In
other words, systems that are androcentric, heterosexual, and biological are
considered to be the “natural” state of being and most authentic among
other variations. Eurocentrism is also a type of ideology and worldview that
includes practices that privilege Western historical and cultural experiences,
values, and concerns of peoples of European descent at the expense of oth-
ers (e.g., minority groups; West, 1993).

Ecological theories emphasize that the interaction between factors in
relationships among the individual (i.e., microsystem), the individual’s
immediate family and community environment (i.e., mesosystem), and the
societal landscape (i.e., macrosystem) fuels and steers an individual’s devel-
opment (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1986). Changes or conflict in any one
system will ripple throughout other layers. To study an individual’s devel-
opment, a researcher must look not only at the individual and her immedi-
ate environment but also at the interaction of the larger cultural environment.
Black feminism and critical race feminism require a critical analysis of these
multiple layers as they relate to the individual and to the groups of which
individuals are a part. An examination of the mesosystemic and macrosys-
temic levels may reveal not only historical institutional discrimination but
also, to an extent, the evolution of collective identity development (i.e.,
standpoint) and adaptative group response. Thus, the utilization of ecologi-
cal theories helps researchers to place into historical context individual and
group standpoints, a vital component of critical race feminism and Black
feminism.

Whereas most critical race feminists and Black feminists purport that
racial and/or ethnic researchers have unique competencies to speak about
the negotiation of intersectionality, I also recognize critical interpretive
jumps can be successfully made by “cultural outsiders” who integrate an
Afrocentric critical race lens into their work. In using a Black feminist or
critical race feminist theoretical lens, how the standpoint is articulated
matters more than the color of the researcher. I do not advocate epistemo-
logical appropriation but rather explicit integration of unique standpoint
when majority family scholars study racial and/or ethnic families. I see this
integration as particularly valuable when it increases the visibility of minor-
ity scholarship in a field where we are just beginning to value ethnic femi-
nisms. As an example of this possibility, Brown, Brody, and Stoneman
(2000), non-Black researchers, carefully incorporated a Black feminist lens
to ground their investigation and interpret their findings with depressed
rural Black women. In their literature review, the researchers identified
stereotyping in the literature on depression as it relates to Black women and

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Few / Integrating Black Consciousness 461

ethnic families. Ecological theory, with its flexibility to multiple methods
and additional theoretical approaches, allowed the researchers to examine
how rural Black women negotiate contextual factors at the microsystemic,
mesosystemic, and macrosystemic levels. In their discussion, Brown et al.
brought to our attention how larger socioeconomic processes as they relate
to depression affect familial factors and dynamics.

Creative culturally sensitive intervention approaches. A third advantage of
Black feminist and critical race feminist theories for family studies is that they
are particularly helpful in developing interventions or prevention strategies
that are culturally accessible and relevant to targeted informants or communi-
ties. Two studies by family scholars provide examples of the integration of cul-
tural nuances to inform intervention approaches. My first example is the use
of African American female sexual scripts in sex education programs and
reproductive policies that target African American youth and communities.
Stephens and Phillips (2003) identified eight African American female sexual
scripts that appear in African American Hip Hop youth culture: the Diva, Gold
Digger, Freak, Dyke, Gangster Bitch, Sister Savior, Earth Mother, and Baby
Mama. As schema used to categorize norms regarding appropriate sexual
beliefs and behaviors, sexual scripts may be useful for identifying the ways in
which this population gives meanings to and values race, ethnicity, gender,
sexual orientation, and interpersonal relationships in the context of sexuality.

Stephens and Phillips’s (2003) findings were applied to Stephens and
Few’s (in press) research on African American adolescents’ attitudes about
physical attractiveness and sexual behaviors in interpersonal relationships.
Using a Black feminist–womanist lens, we discussed the influence of Hip
Hop sexual scripts on adolescents to provide a framework for understand-
ing the tensions between Afrocentric and Eurocentric values on African
American female adolescent sexuality. We deconstructed historical stereo-
typical depictions of Black womanhood to contextualize contemporary Hip
Hop female sexual scripts. Using readily accessible, culturally relevant
symbols (i.e., images found in Hip Hop), we observed that female and male
adolescents were able to articulate their experience of how social construc-
tions of race and gender simultaneously intersected to maintain expecta-
tions of sexual identity and behaviors. In the current study, we identified
Hip Hop …

THE

TRAUMA
OF

RACISM

Dottie Lebron, Laura Morrison, Dan
Ferris, Amanda Alcantara, Danielle

Cummings, Gary Parker & Mary McKay
McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research,
New York University Silver School of Social Work

Facts Matter!

Black Lives Matter!

Copyright © 2015 The McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research, New York University
Silver School of Social Work, All rights reserved.

Research Supports Immediate Action
to End Systemic Racial Oppression

The Trauma of Racism

Place Matters

2

PART TWO

9

PART THREE

18

The Trauma of Racism
Facts Matter! Black Lives Matter!

PART ONE

Research Supports
Immediate Action
to End Systemic
Racial Oppression

PART ONE

F
a
ct

s
M

a
tt

e
r!

B
la

ck
L

iv
e

s
M

a
tt

e
r!

3

I n February 2014, President Obama announced My Brother’s Keeper,1 an initiative that aims to create opportunities for boys
and young men of color. This initiative prioritizes policy that aids
young men and boys of color in achieving six milestones related to
education, employment, health, and violence exposure:

1 Getting a healthy start and entering school ready to learn;

2 Reading at grade level by third grade;

3 Graduating from high school ready for college and career;

4 Completing post-secondary education or training;

5 Successfully entering the workforce;

6 Keeping kids on track and giving them second chances.

The launch of this initiative placed a brief national spotlight on
the systemic disparities in opportunities for and treatment of young
men and boys of color and the associated impact on life outcomes
for these young men and their families. The need for My Brother’s
Keeper is well supported by accumulated research findings that
create a disheartening picture of the serious challenges that
youth of color face, from impediments to opportunities, supports
and resources, as well as the too frequent, life-course-altering
interactions with our currently configured social welfare, education,
health and justice systems. In brief, implicit in this public attention
on the challenges faced by Black and Latino boys and young men
was the recognition of the serious burden they bear, which directly
results from historic and current racial oppression.

The McSilver Institute recognizes the urgent need for policies
and programs that immediately address the social inequalities
that are driven by race, with poverty being one of the serious
consequences of oppression. Below is a summary of select research
on the blocked opportunities and oppressive burden that young
men of color experience. We hope that these findings fuel action
by our government leaders, policy makers, advocacy and provider
organizations and communities. In addition, we highlight select
promising policy and programmatic interventions that could provide
steps to address the serious inequities that appear to be fueling the
accumulating number of young men of color whose lives are cut
short by violence or diminished by lack of opportunities, resources
and supports.

4

Burden of Racial Oppression for
Boys and Young Men of Color

People of color are disproportionately
economically disadvantaged.
Nationally, people of color are more likely to live in poverty than
their White peers. While 11.6 percent of White Americans live
in poverty, 25.8 percent of Black, 23.2 percent of Latino, and 27
percent of American Indian and Alaska Natives live in poverty.2
Families of color are also between six and nine times more likely
than White families to live in areas of concentrated poverty,
exacerbating the effects of poverty and impeding opportunities to
improve financial situations.3

Boys of color achieve the poorest educational outcomes.
In 2009–10, 52 percent of Black and 58 percent of Latino males
graduated from high school in four years, compared to 78 percent
of their White male peers.4 Black men’s college graduation rates
are the lowest among all genders and racial groups in the U.S.5
Additionally, only 37.2 percent of Black and 42.2 percent of Latino
undergraduates at U.S. colleges and universities were men, thus
boys and men of color tend to fare less well in the education system
than their female peers.6

Black and Latino men experience high rates of
unemployment and underemployment.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the first quarter
of 2015, the unemployment rates for Black, Latino, and White men
between the ages of 20 and 24 were 17.8 percent, 10.6 percent,
and 9.1 percent, respectively. Additionally, young people of color
are more likely than their White peers not to be working at their
full capacity.7 A 2014 Center for Economic Policy and Research
study found that in 2013, 55.9 percent of employed black recent
college graduates were “underemployed”—defined as “working in
an occupation that typically does not require a four-year college
degree”—vs. 45 percent of recent college graduates overall.8

5

Men of color are
disproportionately involved in
the criminal justice system.
A U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report
showed Black males born in 2001 had a
32 percent likelihood of going to prison
in their lives, more than five times the
likelihood for White men.9 A 2012 study
found an astounding 68 percent of Black
high school dropouts born between 1975
and 1979 had been to prison by 2009.10 In
addition to long-term negative effects on a
man’s economic mobility, having a family
member in prison creates economic and
emotional instability in the home, further
jeopardizing the well-being of the entire
family.

Implicit bias and discrimination further impede
success for young men and boys of color.
Recent research found that Black boys as young as 10 are viewed as
older and less innocent than their peers among a sample of police
officers from large urban areas.11 Another study found that people
with “Black-sounding” names (e.g., Jamal and Lakisha) were 50
percent less likely to be called for a job than people with “White-
sounding” names when sending identical resumes to a random
sample of employers.12

Promising Policy & Program Solutions
Initiatives like My Brother’s Keeper recognize the urgency of
increasing fairness for men of color. Policy solutions are being
offered with some promising initiatives described below. This list is
offered with the simultaneous recognition, that without addressing
the root causes of racial inequity and only intervening in relation to
the consequences of oppression, injustice will be perpetuated.

ALL MEN
1 in 9

WHITE MEN
1 in 17

BLACK MEN
1 in 3

LATINO MEN
1 in 6

ALL WOMEN
1 in 56

WHITE WOMEN
1 in 111

BLACK WOMEN
1 in 18

LATINO WOMEN
1 in 45

Lifetime Likelihood of Imprisonment
Source: Bonzcar, T. (2003). Prevalence of
Imprisonment in the U.S. Population, 1974,2001.
Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

6

School disciplinary code reform
In New York City during the 2012 school year, 62.5 percent of
students arrested by school safety agents were Black and 32 percent
were Latino.13 The majority of these arrests were for discretion-based
offenses, where students were cited for obstructing governmental
administration or resisting arrest. Mayor Bill de Blasio only recently
revised New York City Department of Education Discipline Code
B21, which stated that “defying or disobeying the lawful authority
or directive of school personnel or school safety agents in a way that
substantially disrupts the educational process” could be punishable
by a principal’s suspension for up to five school days. Nationwide,
nonviolent offenses are taking boys of color out of the classroom,
putting a population that tends to achieve lower outcomes in school
at an even greater disadvantage. Stakeholders across the country
are working to persuade policy makers to decrease out-of-class
punishments for nonviolent school offenses.14

Forward Promise initiative
In July 2013, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced the
Forward Promise initiative to promote opportunities for the health
and success of young men of color in middle and high school.15
The $9.5 million investment funds a variety of programs aimed at
improving health and wellness, dismantling the school-to-prison
pipeline through restorative justice, improving school climate, and
decreasing penalties for non-violent offenses in school.

Job One initiative
On June 24, 2014, Hillary Clinton announced a new Clinton
Foundation youth jobs initiative that will partner with ten companies
to hire, train, and mentor people age 16-24 who are out of school
and unemployed.16 The program is expected to reach 150,000 young
people and if successful, could provide a market-based model for
the improvement of outcomes for this demographic.

Young Adult Internship Program
The New York City Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO)
created the Young Adult Internship Program (YAIP) to place 16-to-
24-year-old young adults who do not work or attend school into

7

short-term, paid internship programs. A September 2014 report
from the Center for an Urban Future cited both quantitative
and anecdotal accounts of YAIP’s efficacy but noted the program
currently falls far short of meeting demand, serving only 1,740 of
the city’s 172,000 disconnected youth in 2013.17

CUNY Fatherhood Academy
The CUNY Fatherhood Academy puts young fathers on the path to
success by strengthening family bonds; reconnecting families; and
helping young fathers earn their GEDs, enroll in college, obtain
employment, and learn parenting skills.18

Expansion of school-based health centers
Numerous studies have shown that access to school-based health
centers (SBHCs) significantly increases adolescents’ utilization
of physical and mental health services.19 Improving school-based
healthcare can aid in early diagnosis and treatment of mental and
physical health issues, improving students’ likelihood of success in
school. SBHCs have also been related to decreased absenteeism,
tardiness, and discipline referrals in schools, further increasing the
likelihood of positive outcomes for boys and young men of color.

Project Step Up
Project Step Up, funded by the Robin Hood Foundation and New
York City Department of Education, is a youth development and
mental health promotion program that aims to promote social-
emotional development, academic achievement, on-time high
school graduation, and a positive transition to young adulthood for
young people of color in East Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Implemented by the McSilver Institute, the program has involved
over 470 students who needed additional supports in school, at
home, or in their community and achieved a graduation rate of
84 percent over the past seven years, among many other positive
educational and mental health outcomes.

8

Conclusion
Boys and men of color face unique and systemic challenges that
negatively affect their own lives, as well as those of their families
and communities. These challenges require immediate action
through policy changes and innovative programming. Initiatives like
Step Up, the Forward Promise Initiative, and school disciplinary
code reforms will help to prevent boys and young men of color
from repeating grades or dropping out, improving their educational
outcomes and reducing their criminal justice contacts. Interventions
like the Job One initiative and the Young Adult Internship Program
can help combat employer bias, prevent poverty, decrease rates of
unemployment and underemployment, and improve outcomes for
future generations of boys and young men of color and their families.
The inequities that boys and young men of color face are complex,
thus it is imperative that organizations and sectors collaborate
to reach the shared goal of addressing disparities head-on and
improving opportunities for boys and men of color and consequently
their families and communities. Finally, this summary is meant to
organize existing research in order to underline the burden of racial
oppression on boys and young men of color and support immediate
action to address the root causes and consequences of racial bias,
for only then can we truly achieve McSilver’s mission of addressing
and eliminating poverty.

The

Trauma
of Racism

PART TWO
F

a
ct

s
M

a
tt

e
r!

B
la

ck
L

iv
e

s
M

a
tt

e
r!

10

Trauma of racism is the result of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, lynching,
de facto and legal discrimination, oppression, employment discrimina-
tion, poverty, social alienation, hate crimes, demonization of non-white
cultures, discriminatory child welfare practices, mass incarceration,
unjust imprisonment, racially biased justice systems, mandatory
sentencing, inhumane treatment within societal institutions, unethical
medical experiments on ethnic and racial minorities, forced steriliza-
tion of Black women, the school to prison pipeline, inferior schools
and education, the achievement gap, the sequestering of minority
students in special education programs, racial housing segregation,
inhumane housing conditions, and discriminatory policing.

R ace is a socially constructed concept that was used to reinforce the rationale for the enslavement of persons of African descent
for economic purposes during the Atlantic Slave Trade.20 The
invention of race as an ethnological human stratification, and the
racism that followed it, created a historical chain of dehumanizing
and traumatic events that continue to hinder human progress.21
Though historically based on faulty science, the creation of this
human hierarchy is now a lived socio-political reality and has severe
consequences for people of color.22-24

The trauma of racism refers to the cumulative negative impact of
racism on the lives of people of color. Encompassing the emotional,
psychological, health, economic and social effects of multi-
generational and historical trauma, trauma of racism relates to the
damaging effects of ongoing societal and intra-social-group racial
micro aggressions, internalized racism, overt racist experiences,
discrimination and oppression within the lives of people of color.

When repetitive and unresolved, these experiences rooted in racism
can create severe emotional pain and distress that can overwhelm
a person’s and community’s ability to cope, creating feelings of
powerlessness.25 For people of color, the burden of the traumatic
experiences associated with racism is evidenced by the significant
racial disparities in educational achievement, health, criminal
justice system participation, and employment. Authors have argued
that the too often bleak circumstances that Black males experience
are the direct outgrowths of white supremacy operating in the daily
lived experiences of people of color.26

Trauma of racism is the result of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, lynching,
de facto and legal discrimination, oppression, employment discrimina-
tion, poverty, social alienation, hate crimes, demonization of non-white
cultures, discriminatory child welfare practices, mass incarceration,
unjust imprisonment, racially biased justice systems, mandatory
sentencing, inhumane treatment within societal institutions, unethical
medical experiments on ethnic and racial minorities, forced steriliza-
tion of Black women, the school to prison pipeline, inferior schools
and education, the achievement gap, the sequestering of minority
students in special education programs, racial housing segregation,
inhumane housing conditions, and discriminatory policing.

11

Cumulatively these unjust experiences have affected multiple
generations, in ways that have created both resilience and particular
societal vulnerabilities.

Body of Knowledge on the Topic
of Trauma and Racism
There is an emerging body of research on trauma and racism and
their psychological and health implications for persons of color.
The similarities of the traumatizing effect of racist experiences and
other forms of trauma have been highlighted by scholars in recent
times. Clinical practice models are emerging that offer guidance
and methods for assessing the impact of racism, contrasting the
traditional notion of trauma with overt and covert racist experiences
and micro aggressions perceived to be racist by clients.27

Several scholars have looked to historical trauma theory while
investigating the relationship between trauma and racism. The
theory of historical trauma has been used in examinations of disease
prevalence and health disparities linked to traumas inflicted upon
historically subjugated groups, positing that populations subjected
to long-term, mass trauma—colonialism, slavery, war, genocide—
have a higher burden of disease than others. Behavioral health
scholar Michelle Sotero devised a historical trauma conceptual
model to delineate physical, psychological and social pathways that
link historical trauma to disease prevalence and health disparities.28

Identifying racism and ethnoviolence as catalysts for Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) and related symptoms has been suggested.
Conducting culturally responsive and racially informed assessment
and interventions with African Americans, Latina/Latino
Americans, Asian/Pacific Islander Americans, Native Americans,
and related immigrant groups when they present with symptoms
of trauma is advised, particularly when their trauma responses are
atypical or the precipitating stressor is ambiguous.29

Several scholars have called for the incorporation of a new general
category into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, citing a need for the inclusion of an “oppression-based
trauma” category to examine “pathologies of oppression” and its
health consequences for people of color.30

12

Some scholars who have connected trauma and racism stress the
need for new approaches to clinical practice. Specifically, they
call for accurately employing the notion of “injury” when assessing
crises caused by racist incidents or experiences, in order to better
capture the external violation and assault inherent in race-based
encounters.31

“Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” describes how the contemporary
life experiences and reactions of African Americans to their external
environment connect to historical racist trauma. The term PTSS
was coined by Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary, a renowned researcher and
social work professional, to indicate how the traumatic experiences
of enslaved persons adapted their attitudes and behaviors to
survive. In her book, she describes how the historical influence of
the violence that permeated the lives of the ancestors of African
Americans has shaped transgenerational attitudes and behaviors.32

Nationally acclaimed public interest lawyer and NYU Law Professor
Bryan Stevenson discusses in his book, Just Mercy, how the unjust
capital murder conviction of Walter McMillan, an African American
man who was framed for murder in Alabama, traumatized his entire
community. In this non-fiction work, Stevenson recounts his expe-
riences as an attorney serving condemned poor and Black men on
death row, and demonstrates how racial discrimination within Ameri-
ca’s criminal justice system traumatizes the poor and people of color.33

Racism and Its Impact on the Educational
Outcomes of Boys of Color
Racism and oppression uniquely impact the lives of boys and young
men of color. One of the most glaring examples is their disparate
experiences and outcomes within school systems. What has been
named “the achievement gap” or the “racial gap in achievement,”
referring to racial disparities in school test scores, grades, drop-out,
graduation rates, and other indicators of academic performance,34
is a reflection of the impact of the historical trauma of racism on
both the lives and families of boys and young men of color and the
continuing legacy of a power paradigm of white supremacy which
has oppressed people and communities of color and erected the
structural racism exemplified in public school processes, pedagogy,
curricula and leadership.

13

June Cara Christian links
education, racism and trauma in
her comparative study. She argues
that formal education has been
used to traumatize and dehumanize
Black students. She suggests that
the academic and policy debate
regarding the achievement gap
perpetuates a myth that Black
students fare poorly academically
because of social and cultural beliefs
in Black intellectual inferiority.
Christian argues that the pervasive
nature of racism in the U.S.
influences students and schooling
processes in ways that implicitly
and explicitly dehumanize Black students, which is the true cause
of their school performance failure. She suggests that “unearthing”
how these processes dehumanize Black students is key to
reconstructing Black academic achievement. Christian writes, “For
many Blacks, schooling holds innumerable emotionally disturbing
racist experiences that were traumatic and continue to unsettle us
well after the event(s). Without any acknowledgment or remedy,
Black students are expected to attend and excel in an institution
that dehumanizes them… Though Blacks suffer a barrage of racist
events in school, in addition to racial assault from the broader
society…these traumas continuously stab old festering wounds of
the past while creating fresh gaping wounds that must be addressed
immediately. Across generations, these wounds rarely heal and can
often manifest in myriad of ways.” 36 Christian suggests the “need
for a shift in focus from Black student underachievement… to the
racist traumas Black students experience daily in schools, which
reciprocally compound other racist traumas Blacks experience
outside of the classroom.” 37

Garrett Albert Duncan examines how Black male students are
marginalized and excluded at an integrated urban high school in the
Midwest known for its caring ethos and academic excellence. In
his ethnographic study of City High School (CHS), which has a
student population of 300, Duncan examines the different stories

READING

BLACK
16%

23%

47%

7%

12%

33%

HISPANIC

WHITE

PROFICIENCY IN MATH

Percentage of 12th Grade Students At or
Above Proficient Level on the 2013 National
Assessment of Educational Progress

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Institute for Education
Sciences, National Center for Educational Statistics. 2013
Mathematics and Reading: Grade 12 Assessments. Retrieved from:
http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_g12_2013

14

that students, teachers, and administrators use to explain the
marginalization and exclusion of Black male students at CHS. In
his study he describes how their sentiments and beliefs about Black
males have put them in a predicament that places them “beyond
love,” a condition where they are excluded from society’s economy
and care networks and expelled from useful participation in social
life.38 He says their views reflect the prevailing idea within the
society that the “exclusion and marginalization of Black males from
schools such as City High School is a normal, albeit problematic,
aspect of the education of this population of students.” Duncan says
this pervasive belief has led Black males to be “constructed as a
strange population” such that “their marginalization and oppression
are understood as natural and primarily of their own doing.” 39

Culturally Responsive Education
The difficulties and setbacks faced by Black students are truly
exceptional. The National Education Association (NEA) has said,
“The statistics describing Black boys as more likely than their peers
to be placed in special education classes, labeled mentally retarded,
suspended from school, or drop out altogether is disturbing enough.
But the surprising news, at once puzzling and promising, is that we
actually have tools to reverse this trajectory and success stories to
prove it.” 40

One of the tools the NEA highlights in its February 2011
publication, Focus on Blacks, is culturally responsive education.
Culturally responsive education links schooling to culture.41 It
creates a reciprocal relationship between teachers and students
where “the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of
ethnically diverse students are used as conduits for teaching them
more effectively.” 42 “This theory postulates that the discontinuities
between the school culture and the home and community cultures
of low-income students and students of color are an important factor
in their low academic achievement…consequently, the academic
achievement of these students will increase if schools and teachers
reflect and draw on their culture and language strengths.” 43

The NEA featured several of the schools using culturally
responsive teaching that are exceeding expectations. Newark Tech

15

in New Jersey, where 85 percent of the mostly Black and Hispanic
students qualify for free or reduced lunch, had 100 percent of
students graduate. Eight-eight percent of these students were
shown to be proficient in math, and 100 percent tested proficient
in reading. Similarly, schools with a culturally responsive approach
in Maryland’s Montgomery County had a 2010 graduation rate of
83 percent, which is 36 percent above the national average for
Black males.44

According to Professor Geneva Gay of the University of Washington
in Seattle, “teachers using this teaching method should know how
to use cultural scaffolding in teaching their students. This involves
using the students’ own cultures and experiences to expand their
intellectual horizons and academic achievement. This begins by
demonstrating culturally sensitive caring and building culturally
responsive learning communities. Teachers have to care so much
about ethnically diverse students and their achievement that they
accept nothing less than high-level success from them and work
diligently to accomplish it.” 45

Culturally responsive education takes into account the student’s
ethnic, cultural, and language background when creating
and teaching school curriculum. There are different ways of
implementing a culturally responsive approach. Geneva Gay points
out the following essential steps:

▶ Developing a Cultural Diversity Knowledge Base: Explicit
knowledge about cultural diversity, including knowing specific
factors and contributions of different ethnic groups.
▶ Designing Culturally Relevant Curricula: Teachers must know
how to convert the first step into something that can be
imparted through the curriculum. Each type of curriculum
present in the classroom should be used as an opportunity to
embrace cultural diversity.
▶ Demonstrating Cultural Caring and Building a Learning
Community: the classroom climate must be conducive
to learning for ethnically diverse students. This begins by
demonstrating culturally sensitive caring and building culturally
responsive learning communities.

⏩

16

The National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational
Systems (NCCRESt) highlights ten specific activities for culturally
responsive instruction: 1) “Acknowledge students’ differences as
well as their commonalities.” 2) “Validate students’ cultural identity
in classroom practices and instructional materials.” 3) “Educate
students about the diversity of the world around them.” 4) “Promote
equity and mutual respect among students.” 5) “Assess students’
ability and achievement validly.” 6) “Foster a positive interrelationship
among students, their families, the community, and school.” 7)
“Motivate students to become active participants in their learning.”
8) “Encourage students to think critically.” 9) “Challenge students
to strive for excellence as defined by their potential.” 10) “Assist
students in becoming socially and politically conscious.” 47

▶ Cross-Cultural Communications: Culturally responsive teacher
preparation programs teach how the communication styles
of different ethnic groups reflect cultural values and shape
learning behaviors and how to modify classroom interactions
to better accommodate them.
▶ Cultural Congruity in Classroom Instruction: This calls for a

delivery that is ‘multiculturalized.’ An example of doing this
would be to match instructional techniques to the learning
styles of diverse students.46

17

Conclusion
Shirley Chisholm, the first Black U.S. congresswoman, said, “racism
is so universal in this country, so widespread and deep-seated, that
it is invisible because it is so normal.” 48 When you consider mass
incarceration, employment disparities, and the achievement gap,
racism in the lives of Black males bears resemblance to trauma
given its injurious effect to their socio-economic prospects and the
powerlessness it can evoke. And yet, there are promising ways to
begin healing these harms by implementing an education program
that is reflective of their lives, culture, history, and experiences.

The Schott Foundation recommends setting the bar higher, looking
to postsecondary attainment and …

6 ~ Crossroads ~ March 2011

The condition of the black family in America has
been an issue of intense debate since the Civil War.
At the heart of this debate is the belief of some
scholars that slavery created a propensity for a weak
and fatherless family. This matrifocal (mother-cen-
tered) family, they argue, became typical of African
Americans both during slavery and after emancipa-
tion and has been perpetuated generationally to the
present time. Other scholars vehemently disagree.
They counter that black American families cannot
be classified as either weak or fatherless. These schol-
ars maintain that blacks adapted to their difficult
circumstances in creative ways to preserve familial
ties.

Although the end of the Civil War resulted in legal
freedom for slaves, black families continued to face
challenges in creating and preserving familial ties.
What were the effects of slavery and emancipation
on African-American families, and what are the
implications for researching their family history
today? This article will argue that blacks placed the
highest priority on their families both during and
after slavery despite the overwhelming difficulties
they faced. It will also provide tips for locating
genealogical records for slave ancestors.

The Definition and Importance of the
African-American Family
It is important to define “family” as it has been used
by African Americans. Scholars generally agree that
since the beginning of slavery in the United States,
African Americans have viewed their families in
terms of kin networks. These kin networks formed
the social basis of African-American communities.1
Slaves were often forcefully removed from their
families. They adapted to their circumstances by
creating family units with other slaves with whom
they lived and worked. Slaves conferred the status
of kin on non-blood relations, addressing each
other as brother, sister, aunt, or uncle.2 Slave par-
ents taught their children to address all older slave
men and women by kin titles, a practice that bound
them to these adults and prepared them in the event
that sale or death separated them from their own
parents and blood relatives.3 Parents relied on these
kin networks to help them raise their children and
understood that at any time, they may also need to
assume the role of “aunt” or “uncle.”4 A black freed-
woman remembered her uncle asking, “Should each
man regard only his own children, and forget all the
others?”5

The Effects of Slavery and
Emancipation on African-American

Families and Family History Research
by Tristan L. Tolman, AG

1 Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 3.
2 Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York:
New Press, 1997), 3.
3 Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 219.
4 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 8.
5 Laura M. Towne, as quoted in Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 185.

African-American Research

March 2011~ Crossroads ~ 7

Despite the importance of these networks, how-
ever, scholars continue to debate the existence and
preeminence of the nuclear slave family. Did black
families remain intact during slavery? Were black
fathers important members of slave families, or were
most slave families matriarchal?

Slave owners regularly separated black family
members from each other by sale. The “legacy of
involuntary exodus was overwhelmingly destructive
to their marriages, kin groups, and communities.”6
When the cotton and sugar plantations in the Lower
South created a high demand for able-bodied slaves
(especially men) in the nineteenth century, approxi-
mately one million black men, women, and children
were sold from the Upper to the Lower South.7 The
constant withdrawal of family members (especially
men) from slave families damaged and sometimes
destroyed slave marriages and families.8

The antebellum South did not recognize slave
families either by law or custom. Slaves could not
legally marry, and slave parents had no legal claim
to their children.9 Husbands and wives could only
live together or visit each other with their masters’
consent.10 One great tragedy of the involuntary
separation of parents and children was that many of
the slave marriages endured long enough to produce
children that had been nurtured by both of their
parents before being sold away.11 Maria Perkins, a
slave, wrote her husband the following letter, which
revealed her heartache at the forced breakup of her
family:

Dear Husband I write you a letter to let you know
my distress my master has sold albert to a trader on
Monday court day and the other child is for sale also
and I want you to let [me] hear from you very soon
before next cort if you can I don’t know when I don’t
want you to wait till Christmas I want you to tell dr

6 Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), viii.
7 Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 144.
8 Stevenson, Life in Black and White, viii.
9 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 7; Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 1–3.
10 Ibid, 155–156.
11 Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 154.

African-American Research

All photos in this article, inmcluding cover, courtesy of the Library of Congress and Michael Hait.

8 ~ Crossroads ~ March 2011

Hamelton and your master if either will buy me they can attend to it know
and then I can go afterwards I don’t want a trader to get me they asked
me if I had got any person to buy me and I told them no they took me to
the court house too they never put me up a man buy the name of brady
bought albert and is gone I don’t know where they say he lives in Scottesville
my things is in several places some is in staunton and if I should be sold I
don’t know what will become of them I don’t expect to meet with the luck
to get that way till I am quite heartsick Nothing more I am and ever will
be your kind wife.12

According to Brenda E. Stevenson, Associate Professor of History at the
University of California, Los Angeles, this continual separation denied
slaves the ability to function as families. It prevented them from shar-
ing the responsibilities of households and children and providing each
other with intimacy and love.13 No slave was immune to the danger of
family separation. Since no one could predict when an owner would die
and how his estate would be divided, all slave marriages were insecure.14
Statistics confirm this reality. In 1864–1865, one in four marriages of
African Americans involved at least one member who had been force-
fully separated from a spouse from an earlier marriage.15

Custom and the nature of slavery did not allow slave men and women
to physically protect or financially support their families. Husbands

could not protect their families
from abuse or exploitation, and
the primary role of slave women
was the work they performed for
their masters—not their fami-
lies.16 It was difficult for slaves to
discipline their children because
they had no authority over
them. Masters assumed disci-
plinary control of slave children
and undermined the authority
of slave parents by disciplining
them in front of their children.17

Even when families were
allowed to live together under
one roof, slavery threatened a
family’s ability to stay together.
Demographer Richard Steckel
calculates that throughout the
South, more than one-half of
slave infants died before they
were one-year old. This mortal-
ity rate was almost double that
of whites. Although the survival
rate improved after slave chil-
dren reached a year of age, their
mortality rate continued to be
double that of whites until they
were fourteen years old.18

Due to these challenges, some
scholars contend that slave fami-
lies became divided, matrifo-
cal, and even pathological. For
example, Daniel P. Moynihan’s
The Negro Family in America:
The Case for National Action19

12 As quoted in Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 35–36.
13 Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 161.
14 Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 153.
15 Ibid, 20.
16 Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 161.
17 Ibid, 249.
18 Ibid.

African-American Research

March 2011~ Crossroads ~ 9

argues that the black family in
America has become a “tangle
of pathology.” Additionally,
Stevenson asserts that most slave
children in Virginia did not
grow up in two-parent homes
and the parental role of slave
men was greatly diminished.20
These scholars agree that matri-
focality was a fundamental char-
acteristic of most slave families,
even when fathers lived locally.21
This condition, they argue, has
plagued black families through-
out the generations.

Other scholars disagree. Herbert
Gutman, Ira Berlin, and Leslie
Rowland state that slave chil-
dren typically had two-parent
homes and that many slaves
had enduring (although not
legally-recognized) marriages.
Their findings are based on their
extensive studies of population
censuses, county marriage reg-
isters, government records, and
letters written by slaves them-
selves.22 While Stevenson’s study
centers almost exclusively on
Virginia slaves, the research of
scholars such as Gutman, Berlin,
and Rowland encompasses slaves
throughout the South.

Although it was often difficult, slaves did develop and sustain family
relations. They established family units and welcomed other kin into
their families as needed.23 They named and nurtured their children,
expected loyalty from them, and tutored them in how to survive in
slavery.24 Slaves forged a culture centered on family and church.25 They
valued their family relationships and reserved their harshest judgments
for the owners that tampered with their families. In fact, slaves believed
that the worst form of punishment was an owner’s interference with
their family relations. They would rather endure the reduction of food
or clothing, the increase of their workload, or even the administration
of violence than the separation from their loved ones.26

Despite arguments to the contrary, many slave fathers played key roles
in their families’ lives. Many fathers who lived apart from their families
were allowed to visit their wives and children on weekends and holi-
days. Some owners provided slave fathers with access to transportation
to facilitate these visits. Many fathers found ways to be involved in the

19 Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family in America: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Re-
search, United States Department of Labor, 1965).
20 Ibid, xii.
21 Ibid, 222.
22 See, for example, Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 8; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 10–11.
23 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 7.
24 Ibid, 8.
25 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 78.
26 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 10.

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10 ~ Crossroads ~ March 2011

lives of their wives
and children when
they lived close
enough to do so.
They provided
emotional support,
moral instruction,
discipline, affec-
tion, and physical
protection when
possible. Often
they brought their
families extra food,
and many taught
their sons special-
ized skills such as hunting, trapping, fishing, metal
and wood working, and the practice of folk medi-
cine.27

During the Civil War, approximately 180,000 black
soldiers served in the Union army.28 The families
of these soldiers frequently camped in makeshift
villages near the army to be near their husbands,
sons, and fathers. The soldiers assisted them as they
could—sharing food and clothing from their own
military rations when possible.29

Post-Bellum Family Reunification
Perhaps the most revealing evidence regarding how
African Americans valued their family relationships
came after the Civil War. After they were freed,
thousands of former slaves whose families had been
dissolved by sale and distance set out to reunite with
their relatives from whom they had been forcibly
separated.30 Much of the movement was local since
many family members lived on neighboring planta-
tions. Some freedmen, however, traveled hundreds

of miles to reunite
with their loved
ones. Occasionally
a former slave who
had been sold away
from his family
to the Southwest
crossed half the
continent to return
to his family when
he was freed.31

Union military
officers were over-
whelmed by ex-

slaves who were on the roads, searching for family
members from whom they had been separated.
Agents of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen,
and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the
Freedmen’s Bureau, who were hired after the war to
provide relief to refugees and ex-slaves, received hun-
dreds of letters from freedmen requesting assistance
in locating lost relatives.32 One ex-slave wrote to the
Bureau from Texas with a request for assistance in
locating “my own dearest relatives” and included a
long list of sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and in-
laws from whom he had been separated when he was
sold in Virginia twenty-four years before.33 Others
took out advertisements in local newspapers, offer-
ing rewards for the return of lost family members.
A typical plea for help was placed in the Nashville
Colored Tennessean:

During the year 1849, Thomas Sample carried away
from this city, as his slaves, our daughter, Polly, and
son….We will give $100 each for them to any person
who will assist them … to get to Nashville, or get
word to us of their whereabouts.34

27 Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 251.
28 Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 3.
29 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 74–75.
30 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 173.
31 Gao Chunchang, African Americans in the Reconstruction Era (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 73.
32 Wilma A. Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 257.
33 Foner, Reconstruction, 82.

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March 2011~ Crossroads ~ 11

Although these requests usually ended in failure,
some succeeded in reuniting family members. One
Union officer wrote his wife in 1865, “I wish you
could see this people as they step from slavery into
freedom. Men are taking their wives and children,
families which had been for a long time broken up
are united and oh! such happiness. I am glad I am
here.”35 A Freedmen’s Bureau officer recounted that
family members searched for lost family members
“with an ardor and faithfulness sufficient to vindi-
cate the fidelity and affection of any race, the excited
joys of the re-gathering being equaled only by the
previous sorrows and pains of separation.”36

One problem with reuniting families occurred when
freedmen and freedwomen located their spouses
only to find that they had remarried since their sep-
aration. Freedmen’s Bureau agents devised a tactic
for resolving such problems. One agent explained,
“Whenever a negro appears before me with 2 or 3
wives who have equal claim upon him, I marry him to
the woman who has the greatest number of helpless
children who otherwise would become a charge on
the bureau.” Typically,
the woman that was
selected was younger,
since Bureau agents
supposed that middle-
aged women would
have older children that
could support them.
Only about 4 percent
of husbands abandoned
one family to live with
another. Some husbands
and wives even lived in
combined families with

two or more wives per husband.37 Creative solutions
such as this provide evidence of the commitment
blacks felt towards their families, even amidst the
challenges their families faced because of slavery.

The task of reuniting families was often extremely
difficult—if not impossible. Some slaves had been
sold so often or so long before emancipation that
family members no longer had reliable information
about their whereabouts. For example, when Milly
Johnson, a freedwoman in North Carolina, set out
to locate her five children, she could only provide
the Freedmen’s Bureau with reliable information
about the whereabouts of one of them.38

The Struggle for Economic Independence
Another problem that freed black families faced
was obtaining economic security. Scholars generally
agree that one of the great tragedies of emancipation
and Reconstruction was the government’s failure
to provide freedmen with land. Many newly freed
blacks had believed that the benevolent government

that had freed them
would provide each fam-
ily with “forty acres and
a mule” so they could
start life anew. For the
vast majority of black
families, this expecta-
tion was not fulfilled.39

Some scholars argue that
the extreme poverty of
most ex-slave families
contributed to their
pathological and matri-

34 Foner, Reconstruction, 84.
35 John W. DeForest, as quoted in Foner, Reconstruction, 84.
36 Chunchang, African Americans in the Reconstruction Era, 73.
37 Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation, 261.
38 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 214.
39 Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1978), xi, 197.

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12 ~ Crossroads ~ March 2011

focal state after emancipation. They contend that
if black fathers had received land and been given
the opportunity to become self-sufficient, perhaps
their wives could have stayed at home to nurture the
children. This may have allowed their children to
receive better education. In short, if black families
had enjoyed economic security, perhaps they would
have maintained familial stability.

The evidence testifies in favor of the resilience of the
African-American family. Emancipation, despite
economic and other challenges, stabilized and
strengthened them. After emancipation, thousands
of black husbands and wives officially and legally
validated their marriages.40 Parents and children
were more often able to live under the same roof,
and by 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-
parent households.41 Newly freed blacks reaffirmed

their commitment to God and religion by organiz-
ing churches that sunk deep roots in Southern soil.
After emancipation, most black mothers quit work-
ing in the fields and became full-time homemak-
ers. Some white planters lamented this loss in the
labor force, and one planter even appealed to the
head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia for mea-
sures to require black women to return to the fields.
Nevertheless, black women almost universally with-
drew from field labor, sending a clear message that
their families came first.42

Unfortunately, the opportunity for black women
to remain at home was often short-lived. The dire
poverty of most black families made it necessary
for fathers and mothers to contribute to the fam-
ily income. One journalist, Charles Nordhoff,
explained in 1875, “Where the negro works for
wages, he tries to keep his wife at home. If he rents
land, or plants on shares, the wife and children help
him in the field.”43 Even if they worked in the fields,
however, freedwomen continued to fulfill their
housekeeping roles as well.

Whites did not generally give loans for purchasing
land to poor blacks, and white prejudice prevented
many blacks from acquiring even small tracts of
land.44 As a result, many black men became either
wage laborers or sharecroppers.45 Some white plant-
ers continued to wreak havoc on African American
families after emancipation. Desperate to recover
some of the labor force that they lost when their
slaves were freed, many white planters used appren-
ticeship laws to keep black children bound to them
as laborers—often without the consent of the chil-
dren’s parents. This deprived the parents of raising

40 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 155–156; Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 7–8.
41 Chunchang, African Americans in the Reconstruction Era, 73; Foner, Reconstruction, 84. Foner states that this statistic is documented by census
returns and by the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings.
42 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 185; Foner, Reconstruction, 85; Chunchang, African Americans in the Reconstruction Era, 89; Sharon
Ann Holt, “Making Freedom Pay: Freedpeople Working for Themselves, North Carolina, 1865–1900,” The Journal of Southern History 60, (May
1994): 232.
43 As quoted in Foner, Reconstruction, 86. See also Chunchang, African Americans in the Reconstruction Era, 75.
44 Chunchang, African Americans in the Reconstruction Era, 87–88.
45 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 185; Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation, 233.

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March 2011~ Crossroads ~ 13

their children and benefitting from the labor their
children would have contributed to their own fami-
lies.46 Black parents fought desperately for the return
of their children, even attempting to buy them out
of apprenticeship.47 Orphaned black children were
particularly vulnerable to apprenticeship. A mem-
ber of an orphan’s kinship family would often step
forward to fight for the child’s release from bondage,
illustrating the continued importance of family for
blacks after emancipation.48

Some of the familial problems created by slavery
have had lasting effects, which are evident today.
Many black families still suffer from poverty.49 A
significant number of black men suffer from poor
health, and black men have a particularly high
death rate.50 Despite this, most black families in the
United States are headed by men.51 Over time, their
economic status has risen, and today most black
Americans grow up in two-parent, middle-class
families.52

Implications for African-American
Genealogical Research
The unique circumstances of black families in
America have important implications for genea-
logical research. If researchers understand the black
family in slavery and emancipation, they will more
often be able to locate helpful records and correctly
identify slave ancestors. Although the process for
researching free blacks is similar to that of research-
ing whites, it can be quite different from the process
of researching slaves.

To search for black ancestors who were slaves, a
researcher must first identify the slave owner.53
Although almost no slaves kept written records of
their own, they were frequently mentioned in the
records of their owners. Wills and probate records
often mentioned slaves by name and sometimes even
listed their relationships to each other. All records of
the slave owner should be researched for clues to the
identities and relationships of the slaves.54

It is also important to understand slave-naming
patterns. Naming patterns often provide impor-
tant clues for identifying family members and kin.
Slaves frequently named their children for parents,
grandparents, aunts, uncles, and sometimes even
great-aunts, great-uncles, and deceased siblings.55

46 Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 402.
47 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 212, 223, 233, 236.
48 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 236.
49 Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 77, 80.
50 Ibid, 84.
51 Ibid. 80.
52 Ibid, 80–81.
53 David T. Thackery, Finding Your African American Ancestors: A Beginner’s Guide (Orem, Utah: Ancestry, 2000), 5.
54 African American Records Quick Guide (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, 2000), 3.
55 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 8; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 190, 192, 195, 198–200. Gutman indicates
that in naming children after their kin, slaves often displayed a preference for the maternal line. However, he also states that many slave sons were
named for their fathers, perhaps because these children were more often separated from their fathers.

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14 ~ Crossroads ~ March 2011

However, slaves were rarely named after their own-
ers, and only about 15 percent of former slaves took
their owners’ surnames when they were emanci-
pated.56

During slavery, many slaves were not
permitted to have surnames.57 Those
who had surnames often retained their
own and refused to assume those of
their masters when they were separated
from family members by sale. In doing
so, slaves rejected close identity with
the new owners and retained a connec-
tion with their family.58

Many emancipated slaves changed
their surnames, indicating their com-
plete abandonment of the past. One
freedwoman explained, “When us
black folks got set free, us’n change
our names, so effen the white folks get
together and change their minds and
don’t let us be free any more, then they
have a hard time finding us.”59 Some
took surnames of people they admired,
such as Lincoln or Washington, while
others took a surname they had been
using for many years, often without
the knowledge of the slave owner.60
This surname was often that of a remote ancestor
who owned the family many years earlier, and it
may hint at ties to a family of origin.61 Researchers

should note the surnames of all of their black
ancestors, since they may serve as important clues
for connecting family members. Also, some blacks
changed their surnames several times.62 If a particu-
lar surname cannot be found, ignore the surname

and focus on given names, ages, and
relationships.63

From 1790 to 1840, slaves appeared
only as counts under the name of
the slave owner. Free black heads of
household, however, were named in
these censuses. Those who were not
heads of household were counted
in the “other free persons” category
from 1790 to 1810 and “free colored”
persons from 1820 to 1840.64 In the
1850 and 1860 censuses, slaves were
enumerated in separate slave sched-
ules. Unfortunately, these schedules
do not list slaves by name. The name
of the owner or person with whom the
slave was living was recorded along
with the number of slaves owned and
the number of slaves manumitted.
Each slave was then listed by age, sex,
and color.65 Few slave schedules have
been indexed.66 In the 1850 and 1860
censuses, the names of all free black

household members were listed.67 Beginning in
1870, former slaves were listed by name on popu-
lation census records along with their birth years,

56 Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 8; African American Records Quick Guide, 3; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 232.
57 Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 8–9.
58 Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 252.
59 Alice Wilkins, as quoted in Chunchang, African Americans in the Reconstruction Era, 82.
60 African American Records Quick Guide, 3; Foner, Reconstruction, 79.
61 Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 231–232, 240; Regosin, Freedom’s Promise, 59.
62 African American Records Quick Guide, 1.
63 Finding Records of Your Ancestors, Part A: African American, 1870 to Present (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, 2003), 8.
64 Anne Bruner Eales and Robert M. Kvasnicka, eds., Genealogical Research in the National Archives of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Na-
tional Archives and Records Administration, 2000), 22-25.
65 Ibid, 25–26. Slave schedules also asked whether the slaves were deaf-mute, blind, insane, idiodic, or fugitives.
66 Loretto Dennis Szucs and Matthew Wright, Finding Answers in U.S. Census Records (Orem, Utah: Ancestry Publishing, 2002), 77.
67 Eales and Kvasnicka, eds., Genealogical Research in the National Archives of the United States, 25–26.
68 Ibid, 26.

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March 2011~ Crossroads ~ 15

birth states, and other household members.68 State
census records can also be useful in researching
African Americans. State censuses were often taken
in years between federal censuses, and some of them
were designed in part to monitor African-American
movement into northern cities. Antebellum state
censuses do not list slaves by name.

Since many ex-slaves were legally married after
emancipation, civil or church marriage records may
provide the names of bride and groom, their birth
dates and parents’ names, the marriage date and
place, and the residence of the couple. Many times,
blacks were listed separately in “colored” registers or
in the back of “white” registers. The abbreviations
“col” or “cold” indicate the person was “colored” and
can be an important clue. Some African Americans
with light skin may have been listed in “white” reg-
isters and others may have been listed in the wrong
book, so it may be necessary to …